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Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Hey ABQ Slam fam and fans, we have the biggest show of the year and a hella good writing intensive on tap THIS SATURDAY!

SATURDAY NIGHT the top 10 performance poets in the 505 battle for the coveted Albuquerque City Championship as well as a spot on the 2010 ABQ National Poetry Slam team at the 2010 ABQ GRAND SLAM on SATURDAY, APRIL 3 at the OUTPOST PERFORMANCE SPACE.

In addition, the winner will receive a signed copy of Monica Youn's new poetry collection, *Ignatz*, thanks to the generoussponsorship of Four Way Books. The deadline for entry is 11:59 PM EST on April 1st. All you have to do is leave a comment on our contest post with your favorite writing exercise and some form of contact information (and if you're really uncomfortable with leaving contact info in a comment, you can also leave your prompt in the comments but email us separately ateditors@lanternreview.com).

Monday, March 29, 2010

Broadsides come early in the month for posting to the not necessarily poetry reading public. I post Broadsides + the copy that comes with them on Mountainair Arts, introduced with a brief note. Here, just note (exhorting readers to take up Broadsiding) + das Ding an sich.

Friday, March 26, 2010

"The Endgame of one of the most acrimonious literary spats in recent times began yesterday when one of the nation's most divisive poets revered for his "brooding verse" and chastised for being "inaccessible" was announced as a candidate for Oxford University's next professor of poetry."

I'm trying to imagine the general American reading public following a competition among academics and poets for a poetry chair as intently as UK readers have been following this one, made all the more entertaining by resignations, withdrawals, scandals and infighting.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

ANTHOLOGY. Try this on for size. Take these six words—Anteros, crippled, spindles, stairwell, threshold, and whirligig—and incorporate them into a poem for possible inclusion in an exciting and daring anthology.

There are no minimum or maximum length requirements for individual poems. We, however, have a three-poem limit for submissions. The only requirement is that you incorporate all six words into one poem. We are most interested in fresh and surprising poems that seamlessly integrate the list words.

Submissions will only be accepted via e-mail. Please e-mail submissions to: (replace (at) with @) by May 15, 2010.

Monday, March 22, 2010

Do you do slam, write poetry, write haiku, perform regularly, or are looking for a place to debut? Make Chroma Art Center at 600 1st Street that place...

When? April 2nd from 630-9pm

Where? 600 1st Street, North East Corner of 1st and Roma downtown

Why? Come be part of Chromas 2year Anniversary, and open studio night!!!!!!

Poets that are interested will read, poetry, and will be allowed to "freestyle" if they wish.... poets will be placed in the gallery, lobby, and throughout the basement hallways, we are also looking for Haiku poets to ride the elevator and spit haiku throughout the night to elevator riders.....

You in? email and tell me how i can get ahold of you we will go from there.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

I HAVE met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

It's the SECOND TO THE LAST QUALIFYING SLAM OF THE SEASON, which wraps up with the GRAND SLAM on April 3 at the OUTPOST PERFORMANCE SPACE.

Tomorrow's event features the world-famous poetry slam as well as the open-mic, PLUS A SPECIAL TWIST: The GAELIC Word of the Day. Use the GAELIC Word of the Day in your poem and you get an extra point.

Friday, March 12, 2010

All of us at PennSound couldn't be happier to hear last night's news that Rae Armantrout'sVersed had been awarded the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. In their official citation, the NBCC praisedVersed for "its demonstration of superb intellect and technique, its melding of experimental poetics but down-to-earth subject matter to create poems you are compelled to return to, that get richer with each reading," while in a recent blog post highlighting finalists, James Marcus observes that Armantrout's work is "playful, poignant, and metaphysically alert?never more so than in Versed [...] whose vigilant, often beautiful poems seem to reset the reader?s mental instrumentation."

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

THE NEW VERSE NEWS covers the news of the day with poems on issues, large and small, international and local. It relies on the submission of poems (especially those of a politically progressive bent) by writers from all over the world.

The editors update the website every day or two with the best work received. What's best? A genuinely poetic take on a very current and specific news story or event.

See the website at http://www.newverse news.com for guidelines and for examples of the kinds of poems THE NEW VERSE NEWS publishes. Then paste your submission and a brief bio in the text of an email (no attachments, please) to <nveditor(at) yahoo.com> (replace (at) with @). Write "Verse News Submission" in the subject line of your email.

Friday, March 5, 2010

cross posted from Miriam's Well. Publication information for Modern Haiku. Miriam Sagan is a featured reader and workshop faculty at the 2010 Poets and Writer's Picnic. She writes:

Haiku may be like stars in the sky–or ants at a picnic–but in any case where there is one there are usually many. Charles Trumball, who has been the editor of MODERN HAIKU since 2006, estimates that as a rule, for one issue, he receives submissions of:

2,763 haiku and senryu
70 haibun
12 sequences

He accepts about 7%, a somewhat larger percentage than other excellent journals. In any case, the current issue, Volume 41.1 Winter-Spring 2010 is a handsome one. From the abstract painting in red and black on the cover to the selection of haiga (haiku and images) in the Poetry Gallery section, MODERN HAIKU presents as both traditional and yes, modern, in its approach. MODERN HAIKU stands out over of the years for its informative and intellectual essays, and for a selection of haiku that is never limited to pure imagism. These haiku also mean something. Here are a few.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Today is the 110th anniversary of the birth of Basil Bunting, one of my favorite poets; I've devoted three posts to quoting him (1, 2, 3) and several others to discussing him. He's obviously one of Mark Woods' favorites too, because wood s lot commemorates him every year, and today's post is particularly full of rich links and quotes. I'll just pass on one, A Note on Basil Bunting by Robert Creeley (from his Collected Essays, available in their entirety online—bless you, University of California Press!):

I am curious to know if an implicit quality of language occurs when words are used in a situation peculiar to their own history. History, however, may be an awkward term, since it might well imply only a respectful attention on the part of the writer rather than the implicit rapport between words and man when both are equivalent effects of time and place. In this sense there is a lovely dense sensuousness to Bunting's poetry, and it is as much the nature of the words as the nature of the man who makes use of them. Again it is a circumstance shared.
...

But the insistent intimate nature of his work moves in the closeness of monosyllables, with a music made of their singleness:

Mist sets lace of frost
on rock for the tide to mangle.
Day is wreathed in what summer lost.
(Briggflatts)

Presumptuously or not, it seems to me a long time since English verse had such an English ear—as sturdy as its words, and from the same occasion.

Monday, March 1, 2010

with a distinctly international flavor, cross posted from The Other weBlog, at The Other Pages, a charming aggregator site with no description or mission statement but featuring mostly poetry (Poets Corner for poetry in the public domain, UniVerse for contemporary) and art with a strong leaning to photography and digital images.